Within the BEYOND project, a first version of BEYOND Collaborative Ground Segment Data Site was released on January 2016 under the auspices of NOA-IAASARS. It is available to public from the following URL: http://groundsegment.space.noa.gr/

Since April 2014, BEYOND has secured real time access to Sentinel-1, S-2, and future S-3, and S-5p data through the Collaborative Ground Segment hosted by NOA. Moreover, BEYOND has gained real time access to EOS (Aqua&Terra), NPP, JPSS, NOAA, MetOP, and FY, through the deployment of a X-/ L-band antenna, allowing real time reception, processing and archiving of data over the Southeastern Europe and Balkan countries.

The BEYOND Collaborative Ground Segment Data Site is a web based system designed to provide EO data to users with Cataloguing, Searching, Viewing and Downloading capabilities from contemporary satellites. Its strengths are: (i) user friendly web-enabled graphical user interface (GUI) and (ii) clean separation with backend functionalities.

Searching procedure involves: (i) the selection of a satellite, (ii) the selection of an instrument, (iii) the selection of a product, and (iv) the selection of a date range to search for products that became available (i.e. ingested) during that range. The search function returns a list of the available products, alongside with useful info (metadata). It offers a Straight-forward download of the product. Some other features that will be available in the future are: (i) more filter options, (ii) customized sorting, and (iii) on the fly compress/download of multiple products.

The ground segment architecture is based on the N-tier paradigm.

The 1st tier is comprised of the ground station and the servers used for acquisition and processing.

The 2nd tier is comprised of the datacenter and the backend processes used to extract and store metadata in the catalogues (e.g. Synchronizer process).

The 3rd tier constitutes the frontend that is used to allow the users to search, view and download products. Ground Segment on the cloud!